Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Girl Who Drank the Moon, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Family and Love
Storytelling, Censorship, and Control
Memory, Forgetting, and the Future
Sorrow vs. Hope
Summary
Analysis
Luna shivers. Papers swirl around her and notebooks crawl up the walls. The books and papers talk over each other until Luna asks them to stop and speak one at a time. They comply and tell Luna about magic, and that scholars developed the castle as a place of learning. She learns that one female scholar brought in a sick child from the woods and said that the child’s parents were dead. The scholars decided to fill the child with magic to prove that it could be done and to study her. The girl didn’t die; she became enmagicked.
What happens to this child speaks again to the horrific things that can happen when someone forcibly separates children from their parents, especially since it seems questionable that this female scholar actually found this child as an orphan. This also makes it clear that the Star Children are extremely lucky to have Xan; their lives could have been much worse had someone not cared so much about settling them with loving families.
Themes
One scholar, Zosimos, thought this was unethical. He heard the child crying at night and so he bound his destiny to the child’s. He warned the others about the Sorrow Eater, who grew more powerful every day. The girl grew and didn’t notice that Zosimos was dying. The papers whisper that they hope when the girl meets the Sorrow Eater, she’ll know what to do. Luna asks who the girl is. The papers say that she’s named Xan.
The revelation that Xan was the Sorrow Eater’s (Sister Ignatia’s) victim as a child makes Sister Ignatia seem even more sinister, as she clearly used Xan as a case study for what’s possible when she separates families and abuses children.
Themes
